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Innovative Azure Stream Analytics customer use cases

Azure Stream Analytics was released as a general available service in April 2015. Azure Stream Analytics is a fully managed stream processing solution in the cloud that has built in resiliency, easy to scale, enterprise grade SLAs, and removes the complexity of development by providing a SQL like language.

Since 2015 we’ve added several new features to the product; many of which requested by users. Our customers helped us shape this product and continue to do so. We wanted to share some of the innovative and interesting experiences our users built with Azure Stream Analytics.

Honeywell Building Solutions

Honeywell Building Solutions is a global business leader in energy efficiency and building automation. They install and manage integrated building control systems including air-handling, lighting, life safety, and security systems for thousands of commercial, residential, municipal, and industrial facilities around the world. These customers look to Honeywell to help them conserve energy and perform prompt and meticulous maintenance on the equipment that keeps their buildings safe and comfortable.

As a way to optimize efficiency and better monitor the health of this equipment, Honeywell Building Solutions tracks the condition and performance of these building assets over time with on-site sensors that capture and record up-to-the-minute information. Each remote sensor collects 20 to 40 distinct data points related to room temperature and humidity from each of the various units across a building.

Honeywell needed a system that could transform the collected data into useful, timely information its customers could act on. For example, if Honeywell could predict when a filter on an air-handling unit needed to be replaced, instead of replacing it on a fixed schedule regardless of need, it could save the customer not only the cost of the filter but also the shipping and installation costs. Honeywell knew this kind of preventative maintenance could also potentially extend the life of that unit by 10 or even 15 months. Multiplying these savings over the thousands of assets it services across hundreds of buildings would mean Honeywell could offer its customers significant savings.

Learn how Azure Stream Analytics gave Honeywell a more effective way to turn asset-monitoring data into activities to conserve energy and preempt maintenance allowing them to improve business processes and create opportunities for more efficient workflows.

New Zealand-based VMob is harnessing IoT to help McDonald’s transform its customer engagement in the Netherlands, Sweden and Japan; regions that represent around 60 percent of the food service retailer’s locations worldwide. With VMob, McDonald’s expanded its existing mobile app in these markets, building on standard features such as product information, restaurant locator and mass offers for promotions and specials.

McDonald’s did this by combining the mobile app with contextual information and social engagement to dynamically personalize the customer experience. When customers open the McDonald’s app, they get individualized content based on their location, the time of day, weather, and their own habits of purchasing and responding to promotions. For example, on a sunny summer afternoon, a customer walking near a store might get an offer for a free ice-cream with a sandwich purchase. Or early on a cold, grey morning, the offer might be for coffee or the customer’s favorite breakfast item.

As a result of deploying the VMob platform, McDonald’s in the Netherlands saw a 700 percent increase in offer redemptions. Also, customers using the app returned to stores twice as often and on average, spent 47 percent more. Read the full story and learn how several Azure Services came together to help VMob achieve this.

Beer IoT with Azure Streaming

Gunnar Peipman explains using Azure Stream Analytics to save data from IoT Hub to SQL database with beer! His requirement is to save valuable data for next cooling sessions and to look up measurements when connection is lost with IoT Hub. Thanks Gunnar for the detailed post.

Fun with IoT and Azure Streaming, The Manhattans Project

Brian Blanchard and Michael Gibson demonstrate how Azure Streaming can provide better understanding of water consumption at 10th Magnitude. Check it out!

We hope these stories inspired you to build your own nifty IoT projects with Azure Stream Analytics. We’d love to hear your stories and share them with rest of the AzureStreaming community so please reach out to us at azstream@microsoft.com or on Twitter @azurestreaming.